The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  In that spirit, K takes after all a healthy swallow of his drink and declares, vis-à-vis Peter’s celebrated Block, that that’s all bullshit. What’s afoot, in her opinion, is a simple though heroic and anyhow ineluctable matter of driving through the Vanishing Point and coming out on the farther side. The sand in Olive Treadway’s egg timer does it every morning. And oh Jesus, we forgot to call home; Hank and Irm will have the helicopters out!

  Peter tells her he radioed Nopoint Point while she was spilling all our family beans to the Talbotts. He forgot to mention it. Things seem okay down there, but the folks are really putting the pressure on for us to get serious and come on home.

  Olive Treadway’s egg timer, Frank Talbott helpfully repeats. He has put our black beret upon his head; Leah and Katherine agree that it becomes him.

  The Sherritts’ Barbadian cook’s, Peter explains, but the matter’s not that simple, whatever else it is. Last time I counted, there were seven several dwarves upon our narrative back, or nine. Cries delighted Katherine I can’t believe you said that! She means that image, those dwarves from our prologue, so to speak, which she recollected herself just a little while ago aboard Reprise. She swears to Christ we’ve become one person; Siamese twins, joined at the imagination.

  Are we stoned? Lee Talbott asks of the four of us. What are these dwarves?

  Kate also wants to know who are the extra two. Not little Onward and Upward in here, surely.

  F. K. Talbott removes the beret, turns it thoughtfully again in his hands, replaces it upon his head, sips beer. Recites Peter Vug. Crump. Fougasse. Dingle. Coomb. Cubby. Coign. Plus maybe Uca Pugnax and Uca Pugilator, if you can remember that far back in this story.

  See? says Mr. to Mrs. Talbott. That’s how real writers and their spouses talk. Do we talk like that? No.

  Base no literary generalizations upon us Sherritt-Sagamores, cautions Peter, and fishes into Story’s lazaret locker. Here’s one of those canisters, by the way: the one that had Act Two and that John Arthur Paisley bandanna in it. The Knapps Narrows one is under your seat. Chimes in Katherine The scripts are in Baggies inside the canisters, each of which contains the key to the other.

  She squeezes Peter’s hand; he apologizes to the Talbotts for our talking house-talk: He’ll explain. If we’re stoned, it is Too-Far-Fetched Coincidence we’re high on; Implausible Possibility.

  This old hat here on my head, Frank Talbott declares authoritatively, is not in fact a beret, but a boina accent on the “boi.” Two sides of the same Pyrenee. He puts it on the flare canister. The Emperor’s Old Hat, remarks K, and scarfs the same canister with our paisley.

  He can deliver babies, too, declares Lee Talbott; so don’t worry. He delivered his own daughter by his first wife.

  In a Volkswagen camper in the public campground under the BBC transmitting tower on the old Crystal Palace Exhibition grounds in London, England, her husband acknowledges, looking his present wife in the eyes. And to us: Bloody battery wouldn’t crank, and the folks camping next door were Australian obstetricians on holiday. Piece of cake. But that was the Nineteen Fifties; I’m out of practice. Another life.

  READY FOR ANOTHER?

  I mean Beck’s or Dos Equis, Katherine adds quickly, but we’re all chuckling. Peter kisses her hand; the moment is defused.

  Leah Allan Silver Talbott says if Kath will give her back that paisley scarf, she can keep the terry robe.

  Thinks Peter Sagamore Back? but says to Franklin Talbott If you’ll tell me what really happened to John Arthur Paisley and Douglas Townshend, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen in SEX EDUCATION, Act Three, after you’ve read Acts One and Two, which you’re welcome to borrow if you’ll return them eventually, because the idea is pretty interesting, actually, and I might want to make use of it someday.

  Says Franklin Talbott to Peter Sagamore If you’ll tell me how it comes to pass that the author of a pretty famous and very good early novel whose characters sail around in a boat named Story is himself sailing around after the fact in a boat named Story but not so named by him, I’ll tell you a not-bad CIA story but not about Doug or Jack Paisley or my brother.

  Says Leah Talbott to both of us Sagamores If you-all will tell us who those seven or nine several dwarves with the funny names are, we’ll get personal and tell you who Drew and Lexie were and why they went down the tubes.

  Uh-oh. To get off that subject, Peter Sagamore says to Franklin Key Talbott If you’ll tell us that not-bad CIA story, I’ll tell all three of you plus Everybody and his brother there a story about improbable coincidence that even Katherine S. S. Sagamore hasn’t heard, because I just now happened to remember it even though it was told me thirteen years ago by a more-celebrated-by-far American writer than yours truly.

  Says Katherine Shorter Sherritt to Peter Sagamore If you’ll tell us that story about improbable coincidence that even I haven’t heard, I’ll tell you who I think wrote SEX EDUCATION: Play, though not why it got put into Alert-and-Locate canisters and deep-sixed, let’s say shallow-sixed, and not how it happened to be us who spotted both canisters, and not why there was an old beret in one and an old paisley scarf in the other, because I don’t know those particular stories. I mean boina.

  Says Franklin Talbott directly but not severely to Leah Talbott If you’ll tell me why your having an abortion at age thirty-five means we’re never going to have any children ever, I’ll tell you why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant until after you’d had that abortion, even though I knew it anyhow, just as I knew you’d had a look at my novel-manuscript that I’d rather you hadn’t looked at till I’d proved to myself that I could write it.

  Uh-oh. To the assembly at large, little Yon and Hither chorus If you four will tell us twain, not whence we babies come—for that mystery we have pretty well cleared up by observation, comparison of notes, and rapt audition of SEX EDUCATION: Play, Acts One and Two, and other tidewater tales—but rather wherefore we were conceived and are about to be launched into your world, which strikes us as we listen to you-all as being at best a problematical one, we’ll tell you a tale of The Swan Prince of Queenstown Creek, which we just now made up with reference to those seven Whistling Swans and one Canada Goose up in Salthouse Cove there, and which we are not unhappy with, considering that it is our maiden effort in the storytelling way.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  DAY 7:

  CHESTER RIVER TO

  WYE ISLAND

  Sometimes these children get no bedtime story at all; sometimes they get Scheherazaded till dawn’s early light, and it takes Peter Sagamore half of Day 7 to log (shorthand) Day 6’s tidewater tales.

  E.g.:

  THE STORY OF THOSE SEVEN SEVERAL DWARVES OR NINE

  upon our familial narrative back.

  Vug, he declares for openers, taking that boina off that canister and perching it upon his hair like an oversize yarmulke, is your Doomsday Factor. I mean living next door to push-button apocalypse and more and more appreciating how imperfectly human beings and their governments control events. Vug teaches a fellow to stop worrying about the death of the novel and to worry instead about the death of all potential readers plus the earth whereon they dwell. For that instruction one is not ungrateful, but the guy is a real conversation-stopper and the very antidote to narrative abundance. That’s Dwarf Vug-Crump? Crump K takes to be her husband’s personal pass and past. His coming on to forty, she means, with certain works and deeds behind him and not others. His particular trajectory as a man and um an artist. His arrival at what may be a mere and enabling pit stop or the Pit itself: very hard to tell which, while Crump there is riding on your shoulders with his warty hands over your eyes.

  We know that Crump fellow, sighs Frank Talbott. An old acquaintance, his wife agrees. Pleased P makes clear to all hands that these several dwarves’ order of introduction is not necessarily the order
of their clambering upon any citizen’s narrative back. Fougasse, for example, is the slippery case of John Arthur Paisley, no? Peter’s involvement with Doug Townshend’s obsession that some U.S. writer of the non-thriller-diller sort be privy to the nitsy-gritsy of our hugger-mugger, if P may so put it. But Fougasse slips aboard well after Dingle, who is the petering out of literary modernism and the not-quite-petering-in of the Best Next Thing. All a chap can do, re Dingle, is scribble on and bear in mind the stockbrokers’ maxim: One is buying not the whole market, but particular issues, which may well rise while most else falls.

  That bear-market maxim, Lee Talbott sympathizes, may be bull; but she believes it to be the case that good artists are realer than the glue on the labels we use to classify them, and can do good work when those labels peel off. She encourages Peter Sagamore to regard Dwarf Dingle as an opportunity rather than a burden. But being an all-but-tenured professional academic, she sympathizes.

  Thanks. Now who is Dwarf Coomb, if not our old friend Less Is More? Bane of bores, scourge of the gussied-up, astringent to logorrhea! But reticence likewise gets to be a bore, and it is the curse of overmuch sophistication that as more and more goes without saying, less and less gets said. The welcomely spare and quiet voice peters into inaudibility; understatement becomes unstatement. After the final word to the wise comes the silence we call Coomb.

  Perhaps, Lee Talbott murmurs, Doctor Francois Rabelais can prescribe. But who am I to say.

  Says Peter So can Doctor K. S. Sherritt, and gets his ear kissed by that physician. But the patient has to learn how to take the medicine.

  Frank Talbott confesses it hard for the non-professionally literary—of whose number he counts himself one despite his acknowledged itch to perpetrate a novel—to follow this uptown blather. But he believes he remembers our mentioning, among those seven several dwarves or nine, one Cubby?

  Cubby indeed. Dwarf Cubby Kate ventures to be our pregnancy: more exactly, the prospect of parenthood, as sobering in some respects as it is exciting in most, and not a truly weightsome dwarf except in company with Vug, who turns cute Cubby into a virtual black hole. If from such gravity not even light escapes, how then shall art? Ah, Cubby!

  To Good and Plenty Peter says Don’t take that personally, kids, and goes on to declare Dwarf Coign to be the mint-tea caper: one’s encounter not only with the Prince of Darkness, but with Darkness’s very Principle. Coign is likewise Kath’s miscarriage, following shortly thereupon.

  Frank Talbott says with dignity he’s sorry. Kath says Don’t be: You’re not your brother.

  And Dwarf Coign, Peter says, makes seven. If there are two more back there, they are Uca Pugnax and U. Pugilator, who may look to the untrained eye like fiddler crabs, but who are in fact a brace of massy dwarves.

  Pugnax was the sudden news of Doug Townshend’s death, which hit us the harder for our having turned our back upon him after that set-to in Carla’s Cavern. To mourn the equivocally dead while on the cusp of giving birth: one more dwarf upon the narrative back. As for Uca Pugilator . . . He closes his eyes. But I’ve run dry.

  Soothes Katherine And no wonder, and massages her friend’s shoulders. Uca Pugilator must be anybody’s pent frustration, on Nopoint Point, at carrying Dwarves One through Eight: a dwarf for each month of Cubby-hood.

  Despite which, Frank Talbott says, between the pair of you you’ve told another story: the story of those seven several dwarves or nine. My compliments, and

  PASS ME THAT BOINA,

  por favor.

  Peter does. Lee points to where she just saw a star fall out of Lyra, but by the time we look up, it has fallen. When we look back, Franklin Talbott is wearing the narrative hat; it fits his strong bald head better than it fit Peter’s strongly haired one. Noch einmal Beck’s, bitte.

  As an early-retired officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Frank begins, it pains me to think that my former employer, my late elder brother, and one of my late best friends—Doomsday Factors every one—had even a minor role in the reduction of our favorite living American novelist to a good short-storyteller, thence to a questionable shorter-and-shorter-storyteller, finally to a man who worries that the world may end before his next sentence and therefore holds his tongue. That’s damn sad, even though you haven’t told me the whole story yet, and I haven’t told you what I knew about it already.

  One dwarf among seven, Peter Sagamore reminds him, or nine. It’s true that once or twice I’ve considered taking up Doug’s line of work: helping the world instead of telling stories about the damn thing. But I know I’d botch it.

  Leah Talbott says Doug may have botched it, too. Her husband says We’ll never know. But it completes the irony that an ex-junior-grade Doomsday Factor like me now wants to write a novel—and I don’t mean a spy novel. Says Lee We hate spy novels; Katherine says Likewise.

  The story he has donned the old boina to tell, Franklin Talbott goes on, is not about spies and Doomsday Factors, except indirectly; but while those subjects are sitting so to speak in Story’s cockpit, he may as well report that in his opinion our mutual friend Doug Townshend had got almost pathological about the DDF business. I agreed with Rick, he says, that Doug had become capable of offing even him on those grounds, not to mention Paisley. His confiding in you to the extent that he did, over such a period, is more than just extraordinary; it strikes me as deranged, much as I loved the man. Didn’t Doug realize who it was he was laying his load on?

  Katherine’s cockles warm at our guest’s regard for her husband. But Peter says I asked for it. I fed on it. The more I saw, the less I spoke, et cetera. Anyhow, that was one dwarf among lots.

  How Lee and I understand it is this, Frank Talbott declares: Rick believed that Doug believed that Rick did Paisley in, for either of the two classic reasons: Paisley was Supermole, or Rick was Supermole and Paisley got the goods on him. Carla B Silver used to worry that Rick was projecting his own capabilities onto Doug, and might do Doug in. In some moods, at least. Rick had called Doug a Doomsday Factor, ready to neutralize exactly the wrong people. She also worried that Doug might do Rick in, whether or not Rick had done in Paisley. The business had got that byzantine.

  Right there, says Peter, is about where I threw up my hands.

  As you would not have, Lee Talbott ventures, at comparable complexity in a novel. But of course, art isn’t life.

  Says Kath Vive la différence. But Lee then adds If Byzantium is where we live, we mustn’t throw up our hands at byzantine complexity, right? and the three of us agree. Yet even in Byzantium, Frank Talbott imagines, some things were simpler than they appeared. In my retired but not inexpert opinion, Jack Paisley really did commit suicide in a spell of chronic depression over this and that, with which neither the CIA nor the KGB had a great deal directly to do. Two dwarves among nine, or eleven. I doubt he was even doing Company work with those fancy radios on Brillig; we’ve got better ways of sweeping Corsica Neck and Hoopersville. John just liked to sail around with fancy radios.

  Thinks Peter Maybe.

  In my opinion, Brother Rick drowned accidentally in circumstances unfortunately similar to those of Paisley’s suicide, though it’s not unimaginable that the loss of Jonathan and his estrangement from Carla put him under. Rick was not a careful sailor, and he had begun to drink a bit much. I had real reservations about lending him the boat—but he was my brother. In my respectful opinion, Carla B Silver’s Gypsy curses may be lived with, though her visions are not to be sniffed at. And in my opinion, neither Doug Townshend’s first heart attack nor his fatal second one was arranged by Agency people, though they certainly are capable of such arrangements. Nor was my own mild episode of last spring, which, along with other dwarves, prompted Lee’s sabbatical leave and Reprise’s Caribbean expedition. But you’re listening to the only man in Queenstown Creek who still believes that there was no sinister conspiracy behind John Kennedy’s assassination.

  Amen, cheers Katherine. That was
not a bad CIA story. Frank Talbott tips her his boina. But it’s not my not-bad CIA story. I’ll tell you that one another time. What I’ve put this old hat on to tell you is

  THE STORY OF THIS OLD HAT.

  Do you mind, Lee?

  Lee doesn’t. Frank Talbott therefore declares it to be a well-known bit of modern literary biography that when young Peter Sagamore went to Spain in Nineteen Whatever, he came back a capital-W Writer. Less well-known, deservedly, is that when Franklin Key Talbott went to live in Spain at just about the same time, with his then wife, for the express purpose of becoming a capital-W Writer, he came .back a candidate for divorce, a prospective recruit for the CIA, and no more of a writer than he’d been before. Such things happen.

  The main thing I picked up in España, he declares, was a fondness for boinas, which persists to this day. The novel I was trying to write back then was set in Madrid, where Rick happened to be stationed. It was about an American writer in Spain whose marriage is going sour and whose brother is a CIA man doing liaison work between U.S. military intelligence and the Franco government, with the objective of protecting our Spanish air and naval bases in the event of anti-Franco uprisings. The novelist in my novel admires Ernest Hemingway and hates Francisco Franco. His brother, whom he also much admires, claims half seriously that if Hemingway’s side, quote unquote, had won the Spanish Civil War, Hitler would have occupied Spain in World War Two, controlled Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, and therefore won the war. The novelist’s wife has an affair in Torremolinos with a young English bar owner, and the novelist himself gets so involved in his research into our efforts to protect our military bases at the possible expense of Spanish democracy that he comes to believe that the only way to undo what people like his brother are doing is to give up writing novels and join the Agency to help reform it from the inside.